On Reading and a way to find your closest pubic library

Reading is fundamental. It is also a major push behind a lot of schooling initiatives.

But is reading in decline. I doubt it.

Reading literary works can surely be in decline but I think it is obvious that the reading environment has changed. A lot of people spend most of their days reading, but it is things like email, memos and the Web. For all the video and audio on the Web the vast majority of it is still text based. After spending so much time reading in a day it is no great surprise that the average person just doesn't want to read when they get home.

Of course, it doesn't help that something like 300 books a day are published, that is far more then anyone can keep up with and most of them just aren't all that good anyway.

We have over 6000 books in our collection most of which at least one of us have read, except for things like the cookbooks and other reference style books. We try to keep our On-hand To Be Read queue somewhat low though our Amazon wishlist is quite large.

I am part of that 17% group that likes to learn from books. Books condense years, decades, even centuries of learning into something you can springboard off of in a matter of hours. That is the greatest time saver ever and probably the highest return on investment you could ever make.

I like the idea of an ebook reader but they miss some important to me capabilities: Notetaking is important for anything other then fiction, linking to other books and articles and creating blog posts would be fantastic. I use books to synthesis ideas by combining ideas and fitting them together like a Tetris game. Sometimes I hit a paradox and it takes some thought to resolve in my mind somehow being about to write that down would be great.

I am hoping that the iPhone/iPod touch will get a ebook reader and good blog posting software after the SDK is released next month. That could really be useful.

Link roundup
TWILIGHT OF THE BOOKS

Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless

The Passion of Steve Jobs

Books are dead (long live books!) and part 2.

A way to find a public library

Dream Home 2.0: The Library

Hackito Ergo Sum: The Library Problem: "In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were."

That ain't nothing, we've got 6000+ books, at least that was where I stopped counting, but it is less then 7000 books. Right now they are mostly in storage except for the 600 or so essential ones. Except for about half a books books we are currently working on at least one of us has read each book. And that doesn't even count all the books we've borrowed from the library. One of the downsides of having above average reading speeds is that we go through books very quickly and they then to pile up.

You know you have a lot of books when you are triple stacking paperbacks with books underneath to allow you to see that there are more there. 2x4s or something might have been better but this was something to do with the not of good books.

That family has worked really hard to organize their books and that is great. We have a different way. We just needed something simple to make the books reasonably easy to find. So we just kept them in broad categories in particular places:

Office: The work related books.
• Engineering
• Science
• Personal Development
• Business Development
• General Reference

Kitchen: Except for the Alton Brown books we haven't read these cover to cover but they are fun to peruse for ideas.
• Cookbooks
• Entertaining
• Nutrition
• Medical
• Gardening

Library:
• Science Fiction and fantasy series by author. This is the bulk of our collection and easiest to hold together.
• Historical fiction.
• Other novels by author.
• Religion
• Classics
• Humor
• &etc.

The media room has all the video and audio products and our daughter had all of her books in a bookshelf in her room. We also had a shelf for oversized books, mostly Art in the living room.

Are all of these good or great books, no but since we have prescreened a large number of them they are generally better then average books. We've had friends comment, "I love coming to your home it's like going to my favorite bookstore." Lending books is just fine a simple checkout sheet taped to the side of one of the bookcases worked for us, if it was leaving the house with a friend.

We haven't had much trouble with duplicates either, but then we buy most of our books online now even if we find something nice at the store or library. It's just cheaper.

We are now in a much smaller place so we are beginning a purge of the not so good books. The hard part here is deciding what isn't worthy to stay. We'll want to remember what we got rid of so we'll be using Delicious Library to hold that stuff, so we don't buy it again later unless we mean it.

Browse Random House books

Random House has created a new ability to browse their books on line. This is a good way to get people to buy since it is more like the bookstore experience.

Books are the most powerful time savers out there.

Today the American Library Association's posters have employed Denzel Washington to encourage kids to read. But how many of these students really buy the message?

I recently spoke with a junior who was stressed about her decreasing ability to focus on anything for longer than two minutes or so. I tried to inspire her by talking about the importance of reading as a way to train the brain. I told her that a good reader develops the same powers of concentration that an athlete or a Buddhist would employ in sport or meditation. "A lot out there is conspiring to distract you," I said.

She rolled her eyes. "That's your opinion about books. It doesn't make it true." To her, the idea that reading might benefit the mind was, well, lame.

This totally misses the point of books, at least non-entertainment books, they are a short cut to learning. Those posters are propaganda and obvious propaganda too. We don't live long enough to recreate all the thought out there and most of those thoughts were wrong anyway.

It is not unusual for an author of a book to work on a problem for 20 years, wasting lots of time on false ideas and dead end theories and then writes a book that filters out all the bad stuff and leaves just the best stuff for us to use to get to the next level.

" If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." -Isaac Newton

Those giants were only able to leave books behind so that others could continue the work.

A book will condense a lifetime of work into something that you can read in a matter of hours or days.

How valuable is that? I read about people that do time management who recommend taking 2 minute showers instead of 7 minute showers to save time. That's pretty good but it is like clipping coupons or buying in bulk, sure they save some money but it is better to buy a good used car and save thousands of dollars in one fell blow then to clip hundreds of coupons over years. If I can condense 20 years, 5 years, or even just 1 year of research into something I can read in a matter of hours how much better is my life? How much further can I go? If I read just 4 books that condense 20 years of research into a weeks worth of reading I have saved an entire lifetime.

What is that worth to you?

That is what is so important about reading and books.